To the Heart of Darkness
by ncfan
Summary: The day he realized -or maybe didn't realize- he loved her was the day she vanished without a trace.


**Characters**: Ishida, Orihime, with Chad and Ichigo thrown in.**  
Pairings**: IshiHime.**  
Warnings/Spoilers**: Spoilers for Hueco Mundo arc.**  
Timeline**: While Ichigo, Ishida and Chad are traveling to Hueco Mundo through the Garganta.**  
Author's Note**: Since only Ichigo really thinks of Chad as "Chad", I would only identify him with that nickname if it was in Ichigo's point of view, and since it isn't, I refer to him as Sado.**  
Disclaimer**: I don't own Bleach.

* * *

Things had quieted down since Ichigo had managed to get a decent foothold. Sado was humming softly to pass the time, humming a song that only he recognized. The low drone of his voice was hypnotic, a testament to his musical ability.

It was impossible to tell how much time had passed since they had entered the Garganta. Without the passage of the sun overhead, there was no way to calculate minutes and hours. It could have been days since they entered, though it was more likely to have simply been a few passing hours.

It had to be past midnight in the mortal world, but Ishida wasn't tired, even with the vicious beating of a training session he had just received, courtesy of Ryuuken. His mind was buzzing with worry and distressed speculations, so much that he could barely hear the straining notes of Sado's voice over the commotion.

Night terrors had become an accepted, if not welcome, facet of Ishida's life. For the most part, those terrors, whether they took on the existence of nightmares or waking occurrences, were eaten from the inside out by Hollows. There were funerals Ishida could remember attending, and even more he couldn't, funerals of relatives without faces, the cousins, distant aunts and uncles, the mother who was little more than a picture in a frame to him, with no substance because he couldn't remember her voice or her spirit. His grandfather's had been the worst, because it had been raining and the viewing in the funeral home had been closed casket because Ishida Soken had been so brutally mauled.

And now, the worst night terror Ishida had experienced was over him, hanging on his shoulders with a sort of power that no Hollow had ever had. It was about funerals again, and a new face filled the crowd, pushing to the front behind all the floating face.

The worst fear that Ishida had ever felt was the fear that before the year was out, he might be attending Inoue Orihime's funeral.

There was no sign of violence. There was no blood, no hint of chaos at her apartment. Orihime had not seemed distressed or distracted in the final hours before her disappearance. Yet Ishida could not accept what every bit of evidence was pointing towards and what the high-ranking Shinigami of Soul Society seemed to believe, that Orihime had gone to Hueco Mundo of her own free will.

_Why would she just do something like that? She wouldn't just go to Hueco Mundo on her own, willingly. Inoue-san wouldn't do that unless she was being forced to._

Hueco Mundo. After witnessing a Hollow attack on a Plus as a small child, Ishida's grandfather had briefly told him of Hueco Mundo after the Hollow abruptly disappeared, without even the smallest trail of reiatsu left behind it. Hueco Mundo was the world between Earth and Soul Society, the border dimension that was the final home of all Hollows. It was a nest of the most dangerous creatures in reality, a place of death where only the dead went and the living never came back from.

And now Orihime was delved deep into that dark hell.

_No one's ever come back…_

There was an unreasoning fear that couldn't be shaken. How had Orihime changed since going to Hueco Mundo? Just as Soul Society had changed them all, so would Hueco Mundo, and Ishida was terrified that when he found Orihime, he wouldn't recognize her at all.

And there was something else beside, something far worse.

She might already be dead. Orihime might have already been dead for hours, and the picture in his mind's eye, of Orihime lying in a pool of blackening blood, drenched scarlet making her hair cling in clumps, her pristine school clothes indelibly stained and her skin blanched deathly white, threatened Ishida with the promise of madness if he couldn't stop what he feared would happen. Her wide open, glazed brown eyes haunted him wherever he focused his concentration on.

_She can't be dead. She can't. She has to come back, alive, whole_. At that point, Ishida had to believe that Orihime would be alright. He couldn't contemplate life without any of his friends, couldn't contemplate life without her.

It was remarkable how, in such a short period of time, Orihime had become to Ishida probably one of the closest friends he had if, along with Sado, Rukia and, yes, Ichigo, the only one. No one had ever made him feel more wanted or less important, more secure or less assured. It was why he hadn't given a second thought of journeying into a place of no return for her, just to see her safe again.

Ishida knew he wouldn't leave Hueco Mundo without Orihime. That was assured, always had, always would be. There was no other plan that Ishida could comprehend.

There were only two ways it could end anymore.

One, that they would all return safely, that Orihime would be back on Earth, alive and whole, when it was all over. That everything would be alright, back to the semblance of normalcy that just covered chaos; it was a chaos Ishida had welcomed, because for the first time in his life he had discovered that nothing was as bad as it had been before because he didn't have to go it alone anymore.

Two, was that if Orihime didn't leave Hueco Mundo, for whatever reason, then Ishida wouldn't leave either. If Orihime had to stay in Hueco Mundo, then Ishida would stay with her, to the end.

It was one night terror that Ishida feared would never end.

And as Ishida sped towards his possible doom, with two young men that he had barely known six months ago but now could not imagine a time when they had not been friends, he had to wonder what it meant that he was willing to follow Orihime into the heart of darkness.


End file.
